Nyah… fits how I learned it. I’m 41 and grew up in Pennsylvania and New York, in case that makes some sort of difference.
I’m sure I’ve heard it (either nyah or nah, but the right melody) in older movies. I will continue to try and remember which ones.
yep, this was our version. Except it was head instead of face. Ick.
Did we all miss the second post in this thread, or were some of you just agreeing? Because I missed it.
Hubby just mentioned another one that has that descending minor third: “Rain, rain, go a-away, come again some other day”
Ours was worse yet:
Nanny nanny boo boo
Stick your head in doo doo
Eat it
Eat it
With some pee pee and poo poo.
My mom and Grandma say “neener neener neener” but I say “Nyah Nyah Nyah Nyah Nyah”
The way I say it sounds like “yeah” but with an “n” in front of it.
You said what I wanted to say. The lecture series was called “The Unanswered Question” and early on Bernstein explained how the overtone series is inherent within each musical tone, and that notes from this series are how the first melodies were constructed. Then to illustrate he played it on the piano singing “nyah nyah nya-nyah nyah.” And pointed out that the notes are the 5th, 6th, and 7th in the overtone series.
As is common with verbal traditions, this childrens ryhme has changed since I was a lad. We sang:
Ring-a ring-a roses
A pocket full of posies
Atishoo Atishoo
We all fall down.
Children would form a circle holding hands and dance around. On the last line - everyone fell down and played dead.
The rhyme is generally supposed to have originated from the plague in London in 1665. The ring of roses was the external evidence of plague and sneezing and dying followed soon after. The posies were to fend off the miasma that they thought was the way it spread.
Back in 1973 Leonard Bernstein proposed that such fragments were part of an underlying universal musical phonology, borrowing heavily from Chomsky on language.
He explains a bit here. The rest of the lecture is worth watching (as is the rest of the series) if you have the time.
It’s a long time ago so musical understanding may well have moved on.
Is this the version you’d use when surrounded by zombies?
Snopes is skeptical about this,
and so is the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. However your statement that the rhyme is ‘generally supposed to have originated from the plague in London in 1665’ appears to be correct, even if the supposition itself is not.
I seldom notice a zombie thread, but seeing a post from Opal was quite jarring.
I do recall all that from childhood.
At my school (central New Jersey) it started “Kindergarten baby”.
At the end of David Brin’s novel Startide Rising…
As the human/dolphin ship is escaping the aliens, the captain of the aliens’ ship is demanding a translation of the human chant, “Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah.”
I read someplace that the taunting descending minor third that shows up at sports events, e.g. Craw-ford, Craw-ford, air ball, air ball, etc., is usually done on the same actual pitch, namely f and d. Checking this out the last time I heard it at a hockey game confirmed it, at least for that instance. Most peculiar. Seems to suggest that while only a handful of individual people have perfect pitch, most sports crowds do. I await the research grant that funds a deep investigation into this phenomenon.
This thread makes me sad.
Your tax dollars at work.
I thought it was “hey, nonny-nonny”
I imagine the variations; neener vs nyah, the pronunciation of “nyuah”, etc. are regional. I grew up in the late 50 in Philadelphia, and there, at that time and in my neighborhood, we always caught a tiger by the toe during “Eenie Meenie Minie Moe”. I never knew about the other version until I was in my 20s.